Linda M. Castellitto

Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Tanen Jones

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

In Tanen Jones’ debut novel, The Better Liar, Leslie learns she cannot claim her half of a $100,000 inheritance unless her sister does as well. She travels to Las Vegas to collect her long-estranged sibling, Robin—who, Leslie is shocked to discover, has very recently died. Then, Leslie meets a woman who could be her sister’s twin and hatches a plan: Mary, an aspiring actress, will accompany Leslie to Albuquerque and pose as Robin, and each woman will receive $50,000. They just have to fool several people for a week, sign some papers and collect the cash. What could go wrong?

We spoke to Jones about her experiences as a first-time novelist, her take on the mutability of memory and why we’re so fascinated by the idea of doppelgangers among us.

Congratulations on your first novel! Has the experience so far been what you thought it’d be, in terms of what it’s like to write a whole, entire book? Or wait for other people’s feedback and edits? Or hold in your hands a finished book with your name on it?
The biggest surprise has been the enthusiasm other people have shown for The Better Liar from the start. I came into the publishing world with a little behind-the-scenes experience, having worked at an academic press and interned at a fiction imprint, and I know that it’s typically a long road. I had written novels as a kid and spent college compiling a thesis of short stories, but The Better Liar was the first novel I wrote as an adult, and things moved very quickly for it. I mostly felt intense relief at receiving professional edits and copyedits, like, yes, God, please tell me how to make it better.

No one can prepare you for how surreal it is to hold a book you wrote. There was a period after college when I wasn’t writing anything. I stopped talking about writing because I got angry with myself: Why should I go on talking and never doing? My partner, whom I’d been with for two or three years, didn’t know that’s what my ambition was, because I became so embarrassed to bring it up. To remember how awfully small I felt about it then and look at my own book on my shelf now—I feel very grateful to have crossed those years.

You previously worked as an editor of criminal justice and law textbooks. Did this work spark your interest in creating your own stories? Were you able to use things you learned from your previous career in The Better Liar?
It did a little! I worked on a criminal justice title that had a chapter about women and crime—why women don’t commit most types of violent crime as often as men, or why it isn’t reported that they do. As far as I’m aware, no one really knows for certain why this is. But we have lots of theories, and one of them is social ties, that because women are more pressured to perform the labor of childcare and maintain social relationships on behalf of the family, they are less likely to become disaffected. That pressure was compelling to me. It was something I too have experienced in certain ways, and because it was invisible to me until it wasn’t, it was only possible to bear until I realized I was bearing it. I wanted to write about that feeling.

It was so interesting to see the characters’ different approaches to lying. Even though the inheritance scam was her idea, Leslie is so tense and furtive, while her pretend-sister Mary maintains a daring and open attitude. Was it fun to move between Leslie’s attempts to maintain control and Mary’s what-could-go-wrong decisions? Did you employ any rituals or practices that helped put you in the various narrative headspaces?
Writing this book felt like acting, and since I usually write entire scenes at a time, I typically had at least 24 hours between roles to recalibrate. Leslie’s scenes were definitely more difficult, as she turns so much of herself inward. I worked hard to give this book genuine emotional weight, and to do that I had to deeply empathize with and reason my way through decisions I would never make in real life, which often felt quite destabilizing when I surfaced from a writing session.

As for rituals, I played certain songs over and over to keep pace with the scene I was running and rerunning in my head. I must have played “Wedding Bell Blues” 4,000 times while I wrote this book.

Do you see aspects of yourself in your characters? Does one (or more) of them remind you of yourself in any particular way?
Yes and no. Between the three narrators, I’m more of a Leslie, I think. I have a really comprehensive Google calendar, and I would rather eat glass than fail publicly. But I’m queer like Mary and Robin, and Mary has my taste in music. Robin has my inability to let anything go.

“No one can prepare you for how surreal it is to hold a book you wrote.”

Your story is a delightfully complex one, with three points of view, so many layers of lies and deception and lots of revelations. Did you lay out the entire novel before you started writing, or are you more of a let-the-thoughts-flow sort?
I lay out every twist and turn, for every draft, and I write chronologically, even for rewrites. But I do invent smaller things as I go along, or I discover that certain scenes need more or fewer beats to achieve the right pace. I read my work aloud to myself sometimes, and I’ll even tap along with it, making the rhythm of the writing audible, and fix lines that go on too long or ending paragraphs that don’t strike the right note. I wrote the first draft very quickly, pushing myself through the entire novel just to reward myself with the experience of writing the ending I had in my head, a big percussive finale that I couldn’t wait to put down on paper. That ending, although I rewrote its tone several times, never changed in essence throughout the editing process. It was what made this book special from the start.

The idea that people aren’t who we think they are is, of course, great fun (and sometimes scary) to think about—what about the notion of hiding in plain sight most fascinates you?
I’m obsessed with spies and identity and deception. Part of the idea for this book came from thinking about how the only way to understand a family dynamic is to be inside it, but once you’re part of it, you can no longer see it clearly—so I wrote an outsider who could pretend to be an insider. I’m not sure where my obsession comes from, maybe because I spent adolescence feeling that my appearance obscured me. There are a lot of adult men who like to exercise their egos on young girls. I grew frustrated that they saw me as such an easy target. I used to wish I could shock them with the truth of me somehow—grow 10 feet or take off my face. But of course they wouldn’t have been at all shocked or even particularly interested in whatever truth I had to show them.

Albuquerque served as an intriguing backdrop for your story. The line about how backyards there “look like aquariums waiting to be filled with water” was particularly evocative. What about the city made it an appealing choice for you? Have you spent much time there, and/or did you visit to research the look and feel of the area?
My mother grew up in Albuquerque, and my grandmother still lives there. I visited almost every year as a kid and still go for holidays. I wanted to write about a place I was familiar with, and I’ve always thought Albuquerque would be a good place to set a noir. You can jump and see the whole city, it’s so flat, which lends it an interesting visual contrast to characters who conceal almost everything.

Although I’ve been many times, you can credit all the street names in the book to my grandmother, who got in her car and literally drove every route in the book to fact-check it for me. She was so excited that I set the book in her hometown but very concerned that Albuquerque locals would know me for a fraud.

“I read my work aloud to myself sometimes, and I’ll even tap along with it, making the rhythm of the writing audible.”

Since your book is called The Better Liar: Are you good at spotting when someone might be hiding a part of themselves or practicing some other form of deception?
Probably not! Luckily, I think most people lie about smaller things: lies to seem more together, or more likable, or to keep from burdening other people. I almost always buy it, and I constantly believe that everybody else has a very easy, Instagram-ready life.

What’s coming up next for you? Perhaps a book tour, a relaxing vacation or another novel (no pressure!)?
I’m taking off work January 14 to walk around NYC and try to spot my book in bookstores and cry, and then on January 15, I’ll be launching the book at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn! Please come and see me—I’ve never met any of my readers in real life yet, and it would mean so much to me.

I do have another book in mind right now. It’s not what people might have expected me to write after The Better Liar, but it’s just as twisty. Wish me luck.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Better Liar.

Author photo © Rachel Thalia

We spoke to Tanen Jones about her experiences as a first-time novelist and why we’re so fascinated by the idea of doppelgangers among us.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Peter Swanson

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Malcolm “Mal” Kershaw’s days are steeped in mystery. He’s a constant reader and recommender of the genre and, after many years as a bookseller, now co-owns Old Devils Bookstore along with a mystery author. Mal’s home is austere, his routines simple, his days mostly ordinary. 

But then: FBI agent Gwen Mulvey shows up at the store to ask about three homicides reminiscent of those in Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders. Years ago, Mal wrote a blog post about “the cleverest, the most ingenious, the most foolproof . . . murders in crime fiction history,” a post that now seems to be serving as a checklist for a murderer whom Gwen must stop before he strikes again.

Like Mal, author Peter Swanson has a nigh encyclopedic knowledge of mysteries, thanks to his own years spent working in bookstores. “I loved being a bookseller!” he says. “I’ve definitely had a lifelong love of reading, and I was always doing a little writing on the side. . . . I didn’t try my hand at a novel until I was deep into my 30s and didn’t get an agent until I was in my 40s, for the fourth book I’d written.”

That was The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, published in 2014. Eight Perfect Murders is his sixth book (and he’s got a couple more in the works). Thus far, all of Swanson’s books have been set in New England, where he grew up, went to college and now lives. When conjuring up Eight Perfect Murders, Swanson says he instantly gravitated toward Beacon Hill, “the beautiful section of Boston I live in. . . . It’s got narrow streets, high hills, cobblestones—that gothic mystery feel. Plus, I like my books to have seasons.”

Read our review of Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson.

Mal’s life is in a decidedly wintry season. There’s wind and snow and a truly chilling feeling of impending doom taking root in his heart. He’s flattered that an FBI agent would seek his help, but also increasingly worried that she’ll find out he’s keeping secrets or, even worse, decide he’s a suspect. He maintains his evening rituals (music, beer, poetry) and daytime duties (managing staff, reshelving, feeding the bookstore cat) as he rereads the mysteries from his original blog post in search of clues. As the days pass and the pages turn, he becomes ever more paranoid; everyone he encounters seems a reasonable suspect, every plotline a complex yet viable real-life scenario.

Swanson says the idea for the book and its titular list bubbled up to the surface when he was walking around Walden Pond, not far from his home. “I’m a full-time writer,” he explains, “and I spend half my day writing and the other half taking a long walk somewhere. I was working out a short story and thinking, what are clever murder ideas in books, really clever ways to disguise what actually happened? I was thinking of this list, and then the book was just there. What if someone wrote it down and used it to commit real murders?”

“My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios.”

Nearly the entire book was in Swanson’s head by walk’s end, which “was exciting, but also horrifying,” he says. “Now I’ve got to sit down and go sentence to sentence!” But before hitting the keyboard, Swanson dove into his list of books. “I wasn’t picking what I think are the best murder mysteries; I was thinking about clever crimes that disguised the murderer’s intent.”

The books he chose—and that Mal explores in his literary-detective adventures—include Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train, Donna Tartt’s blockbuster The Secret History and The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne, who’s best known as the creator of the adorable, nonmurderous Winnie-the-Pooh. 

“I love reading across the genre. And I think, even though I read procedurals that are steeped in forensic evidence, I don’t tend to gravitate toward writing them,” Swanson says. “My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios. I’m much more interested in people who are in the gray area between criminal and noncriminal, murderer and nonmurderer, and how people get from one to the other.”

Fortunately, crafting such macabre tales while immersing himself in murderers’ minds hasn’t adversely affected Swanson’s psyche. “Generally, I’m fine!” he says, laughing. “I gravitate toward dark stuff, whether it’s movies, TV or what I write, but it doesn’t really affect me.”

As a reader, he’s been interested in the scarier stuff since childhood. “I don’t know why I was attracted to creepier books as a kid, but I was just like Malcolm was. I was probably 11 or 12, and my parents had beach books around the house, like Coma and Jaws. Once I read them, I was like, ‘This is what I want to read!’ I was hooked.” 

Readers are sure to be hooked on Eight Perfect Murders, too. It’s a thrill to discover how Swanson braids the various books’ plots together as Malcolm grows ever more uneasy, the murderer ever bolder and the FBI ever more suspicious. And then there’s the story’s fulsome bibliophilia, from its book-loving characters to Malcolm’s expert and thoughtful literary musings—the perfect murder list itself is a ready-made TBR, with more titles and authors mentioned as the action unfolds. Because clever crimes and tension aside, Eight Perfect Murders is really about the joys (and dangers) of being a reader.

 

Author photo © Jim Ferguson.

We talked to Peter Swanson about how his encyclopedic knowledge of mysteries—and his past as a bookseller—inspired this twist-filled story.
NonfictionMemoirMedicine

Sarah Ramey

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Sarah Ramey’s The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is at once a comforting embrace and a call to arms for people (mostly women, alas) who experience mysterious chronic illnesses. The book is a figurative finger, trembling with rage, pointing directly at the deeply held sexism at the root of so many problems in American health care. It’s also a funny, honest, often beautiful recounting of the author’s personal journey through illness after illness after illness, during which she maintains her hope and optimism. 

Ramey spoke with BookPage about her powerhouse memoir in a call to her home in Washington, D.C.—an auspicious conversation, considering that getting her book to publication has been such an astounding journey, thanks to years of health challenges. “I wrote it over a 15-year period,” she says. “It’s so funny—someone told me I’m the most overdue author they’ve ever encountered!”

“It became clear that mine was not a psychological condition. It was a problem in the psyche of the doctors—the programmed assumptions, unconscious bias, prejudice against this type of patient, particularly against women.”

That’s impressive in its own way, of course, but Ramey used the delay as an opportunity for more research, and thus more potential for greater impact. “In the beginning, nobody was talking about [the things I was writing about],” Ramey says. “I don’t think the microbiome was even mentioned in the original proposal, and gut health was not yet a common term . . . but as every year has gone by, it’s come more and more into the mainstream. . . . I learned so much in that interim period.”

The author has conducted an enormous amount of research into the conditions common to what she calls “WOMIs”—a “woman with a mysterious illness” who is “exhausted, gluten-free, and likely in possession of at least one autoimmune disease. She is allergic to . . . (everything), aching from tip to toe, digestively impaired, and on uneasy terms with her reproductive system. She is addled, embarrassed, ashamed, and inflamed. She is one of us.”

Clearly, being a WOMI isn’t an easy existence, not least of all because the inability to diagnose and prescribe a sure fix for these conditions typically leads to skepticism and dismissal from medical practitioners. And it definitely doesn’t help that WOMIs may not always look sick. The number of times Ramey (who has gyno-rectal disease, gut issues and more) has been dismissed, doubted, scoffed at and much worse—botched surgeries and unapologetically cruel doctors, for starters—is staggering.

But Ramey is an engaging and witty narrator, and readers will nod along with her as she describes the arc of her reactions to such treatment. In the beginning, she says, “I was a lot nicer to doctors” who treated her poorly because—well, she needed them. But as time went on and her motives and sanity were repeatedly questioned, Ramey got angry. She began speaking up for herself, and she began writing the book so that other women like her wouldn’t feel alone. (And these women are legion. Autoimmune illness numbers have tripled in the last 30 years.)

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness.

The author says she believes the American health care system can and must change. “It became clear that mine was not a psychological condition. It was a problem in the psyche of the doctors—the programmed assumptions, unconscious bias, prejudice against this type of patient, particularly against women,” she says. “If you can’t prove what’s wrong with you, it’s much more likely you will get swept away. That is part of the culture, and it’s wrong, and it’s very difficult to combat as a single person in the moment because of the power dynamic.”

For Ramey, changing her mindset has been a key part of her adjustment to living with chronic illness. She writes, “In the alternative medicine world, following your bliss is highly correlated to healing.” Thus, rather than pushing through the pain and trying to get better faster, she’s engaged in “a lot of phases of trying to figure out how to make my life as good as it could be within really tight parameters.” That’s included adopting a cat (who was “right here looking at me encouragingly” during our interview), as well as inhabiting her singer-songwriter alter ego, Wolf Larsen, whenever she can.

Ramey says she hasn’t performed in the last couple of years because she’s been having “surgeries and interventions to reconstruct and make things better” in her poor, beleaguered pelvis, “but when things quiet down and this overdue book is out, I’m going to record an album I’ve had written for quite a while.”

She adds, “I’m a hope-monger! I used to say every year, ‘This is the year I get better and do this many shows.’ I don’t do that anymore. I now accept that I’m a studio musician I’m not going to perform live very often, and that’s fine.” (However, her all-female band, GlitterSnatch, does plan to perform at a couple of her book events.)

And when it comes to The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, Ramey says, “I’m hoping that it can help change the conversation a little bit, the dynamic between the patient and the people around them. A main goal for me is to be another person helping to make this invisible problem visible.”

Author photo © Julius Schlosburg.

Sarah Ramey talks about the intersection of medicine and misogyny, laid bare in her powerful (and, against the odds, hilarious) memoir.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Julia Spencer-Fleming

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Millers Kill is a picturesque small town in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. But as any mystery aficionado knows, even lovely leafy settings have a dark side—like two unsolved murders, one in 1952, the other in 1972. And then, in the present, Millers Kill Police Chief Russ van Alstyne learns it’s happened again. There is yet another murder with the same confounding characteristics: The victim is a beautiful young woman wearing a new dress, her purse and ID are missing and there are no bodily indications of what caused her untimely demise.

We talked to author Julia Spencer-Fleming about Hid From Our Eyes, her newest novel featuring Russ and his wife, Episcopalian priest Clare Fergusson, in which secrets from the past taint the future, politics and money loom large and the MKPD is racing to solve the crime before the police department is defunded and the killer gets away with it—again.

Congratulations on your new book! It’s been about nine years since your last Clare-and-Russ novel, Through the Evil Days. Did you revisit your previous books, delve into your notes, etc., to get yourself back into the mindset of your characters and their community?
I did all of those to reacquaint myself with Clare and Russ and the people of Millers Kill! One thing that helped a lot was relistening to the audiobooks with their wonderful narrator, Suzanne Toren. There’s something about listening rather than reading that allows me to experience the words in a fresh way, which in turn enables me to tune in to aspects of the characters that I might let my eye skip over if I was reading on paper.

In creating Millers Kill, you did such a wonderful job evoking the feeling of the Adirondacks, from the mountainous backdrop to the use of the word “camp” to refer to what’s often quite a large house. What is it about the area that made it feel like the ideal setting for your stories? Do you visit often as a refresher, or is the area vivid in your mind?
Although I’ve lived in Maine for 30 (mumble) years now, I’m originally from that part of New York, and having spent many of my growing-up years there, certain aspects are so deeply embedded I could probably write convincingly about the area even if I moved to Paris and never came back again! However, I do go back regularly to keep the sights and sounds and smells at the front of my brain. In addition to visiting, I try to keep a hand in with research and current events, so I’m not accidentally describing places as they were in 1979. Writing about Saratoga, for instance, requires me to update my memories, because the town has changed almost beyond recognition from when I was a girl.

I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know.

The goings-on in the book take place across decades, and while key aspects of police work (analyzing clues, following leads, conducting interviews) remain the same, medicine and technology have advanced in so many ways. Was it difficult to keep track of all of your characters while also remaining true to each era? Did you do lots of research about the specifics, perhaps with a police chief, medical examiner or the like on speed-dial?
I was fortunate enough to be able to call on a detective, a doctor and a pharmacist with specific questions for Hid From Our Eyes, and I did a lot of research into the details of life in the early 1950s and 1970s. I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know. I have friends like Rhys Bowen who exclusively write historical fiction, and I am in awe of their ability to nail the research and turn in books on time!

Tracking the changes of various characters as they grew older was much easier for me, in part because I tend to have fairly detailed biographies of major characters at the ready. So I knew a lot about Russ and his mother Margy, and about police chiefs Jack Liddle and Harry McNeil, who appeared in an earlier book in the series.

You went to college for art and acting, and you also have your J.D. Did you work as a lawyer before you became an author? What made you want to transition to the writing life? Do you think your studies in the arts and the law influence how and what you write?
I used to joke that law school taught me what NOT to write, but that’s not really fair. Despite centuries of jokes, good legal writing requires the “ABCs”—accuracy, brevity and clarity. Those aren’t bad habits for a novelist to pick up. Acting and theater, interestingly, have continued to prove useful, as the same techniques I learned for creating characters on stage are the ones I use for creating characters on the page. As for why I left the law to become a full-time writer? The money, obviously.

People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath.

Both Russ and Clare are veterans who have experienced PTSD, and they’ve both chosen professions that require discretion and dignity. Do you think that’s a big part of what makes them work so well together as a couple and as parents?
The similarities of their professions are definitely what initially drew them together. People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath. And, of course, they did see each other as fully human from the start.

One piece of writing has always been in my mind while writing these books: Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric, “There is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Russ and Clare are people who have been broken, they have broken each other, and cherishing their brokenness makes everything about them a little richer and more tender. I love the fact that they both clash with and complement each other. Without that, my novels would be shorter and a lot more dull.

Clare is an Episcopal priest, and your books’ titles are drawn from Episcopalian hymns. What does religion mean to you, in terms of your writing? Was it important to you to create characters who coexist lovingly, even if they have different views on faith?
One of the reasons the starting point for my series was Clare Fergusson was because I wanted to explore questions I had about my own faith. How do we act as believing people in a largely secular world? What does it mean to be the hands and feet of God? How, if you’re called on to love and forgive, do you love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable? I also wanted to share my view of religion—that it’s OK to be scared, to doubt, to screw up—and, in a time when “Christian” increasingly is defined by narrow-mindedness and exclusion, to show people what my church is like: open minded, radically welcoming, progressive.

At the same time, it was also very important to me to make sure readers of any faith, or none, could connect with my characters. The last thing I wanted to do was preach. So there’s Russ, somewhere on the agnostic/atheist border, and Clare respects and honors his point of view. She doesn’t hide her beliefs, and she never tries to change his. You have Kevin Flynn, who’s probably a lapsed Catholic because he sleeps in on Sunday, and Hadley Knox, who goes to church because she thinks it’s good for her kids. In other words, I try to portray a picture of American religion as it’s actually experienced in a lot of Northern Kingdom/New England small towns.

Relationships between mentors and proteges figure prominently in Hid From Our Eyes. Russ mentors and supports his officers, Clare does the same for her new intern and police chiefs of the past offer wisdom and support to those next in line. Can you share your thoughts on the value of this sort of relationship?
It was something I started thinking about when raising my middle child, my son. I had never really seen a boy growing up before; my brother is nine years younger than I am and I was off to college well before his teen years. I came to realize, seeing my son and his friends, that while girls sort of fall into womanhood on their own, boys have to be taught to be men. They crave that relationship, from fathers or uncles or from mentors. The older and wiser person in the relationship has tremendous power, and I got to explore the use of that power for good and for ill in the book. And of course, there’s an echo of that idea in religion, in the idea of the initiate into sacred mysteries, which is where Clare comes in. All the while she feels she’s flailing around, doing “priesthood” wrong, she’s showing Joni and others, “This is what I do, you can do it too.”

Various characters in Hid From Our Eyes are struggling with difficulties from their past, like policewoman Hadley Knox, whose vindictive ex-husband is trying to cost her her job and custody of their kids, and Russ, who was a person of interest in the 1972 murder. Is this idea, how the past can have a hold on the present, something that intrigues you as you write your books ?
Oh, yes. “The past that won’t stay dead” appears again and again in my books. I used to say it came out of the context; small towns have long memories, and even after all the firsthand participants have passed, stories of memorable happenings and people continue to circulate. That’s still true, obviously, but now I also think it’s rooted in my own sense, as I get older, of just how much the past shapes each of us, and how hard it can be to move forward and break away from the events and individuals that have steered the course of our lives.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hid From Our Eyes.

You kept your chapters short and your ending a cliffhanger, which definitely amps up the excitement and the page-turning! What’s your favorite kind of book to read? Do you enjoy mystery and suspense when you’re not the one creating it?
I love mysteries and thrillers—and cliffhangers!—and read a lot of it when, as you astutely put it, I’m not creating it. When I’m face down in a manuscript, it’s hard to delve into others’ mysteries; I find I either beat my breast in despair because my writing will never be as good as X’s, or the next day I write in some clever plot twist and then realize, oops! I just read that last night.

My other great love is science fiction. I’m actually a failed SF writer—my first attempt at a novel was a space opera. Terribly derivative and totally not what anyone was reading or selling back in the late ’90s. But the core of the plot was a murder on a space station, so my destiny was already apparent.

In the Bleak Midwinter, your first Russ-and-Clare book, was published in 2002. Has your approach to writing, and to your characters and their fictional world, changed since then? Do you think you’ll be writing about them for years to come?
I always thought the Millers Kill novels would be a five-book series, because the central story question was “Will they, or won’t they?” and how long can you stretch that out? Then I got to the point where I answered that question and discovered I had this large cast of layered, interesting characters to lay with, and wow, there were a LOT more stories I wanted to tell. Right now, I can see myself happy in Millers Kill for many more years.

My approach to writing since (ouch!) 2002? I’ve become a great deal more relaxed. I still plod through the middle of the book and agonize over wrapping up the ending and I’m always ping-ponging between complete conviction that I’m a hack or a genius, but I trust my process and choices much more than I did at the beginning. If I want to take a detour with a character or an event or a setting, I trust it will serve the greater story, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. And I have an excellent editor, who’ll make me take it out if I’m deluding myself!

Is there anything else you want to share about Hid From Our Eyes, or anything else you may have in the works?
I hope everyone will take a peek at it—you can’t pick it up in a bookstore and thumb through the pages, but there are excerpts at Macmillan.com and at my blog, JungleRedWriters.com. Meanwhile, I’m working on the 10th Clare and Russ book, working title: At Midnight Comes the Cry. I don’t want to make my readers wait another six years to resolve the current cliffhanger!

 

Author photo by Geoff Green.

We talked to author Julia Spencer-Fleming about Hid from Our Eyes, her newest novel featuring Russ van Alstyne and his wife, Episcopalian priest Clare Fergusson.

FictionThriller

Sara Sligar

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Accomplished, tormented artist Miranda Brand is at the heart of Sara Sligar’s Take Me Apart. Alas, readers and protagonist Kate Aitken may only meet Miranda after her death, via the paper detritus she has left behind: letters, news clippings, receipts, legal documents, prints and lecture notes. The famous photographer’s son, Theo, hires Kate to archive Miranda’s personal effects in preparation for auction. It’s an exciting opportunity and, Kate hopes, just the thing to reset her own career and mental health. But Callinas, California, while beautiful and beachy, is an insular small town rife with relentless speculation about Miranda’s death. As the days pass and the questions persist, Kate’s professional fascination evolves into personal obsession. Was the artist’s purported suicide actually murder?

It’s easy to see why Take Me Apart earned a spot on many lists of 2020’s most-anticipated titles, including BookPage’s own Women to Watch. Sligar is herself an artist of words, and her debut novel will unsettle, provoke and linger.

The cover of Take Me Apart is intriguing upon first look, and ultimately reveals itself to be very well-suited to the tale that lies within. Did you have any input into the cover-art process? How did you react when you saw the final cover and held your first book (congratulations!) for the first time?
I love the cover so much! It’s by Alex Merto at FSG, and I am so grateful to him and Rodrigo Corral, the art director, for all the work they put into it. It took a while to find the right cover, since everyone wanted it to appeal to both mystery/thriller fans and literary fiction fans. But we got there! I’m glad it took so long since we wound up with something so amazing and graphic and eye-grabbing. Seeing the final cover was definitely emotional for me. It made the whole process feel more real.

“But one influence you can definitely see in Take Me Apart is the influence of gothic literature—I love spooky, atmospheric books.”

After studying literature and history in pursuit of your M.Phil. and Ph.D., what eras, genres or authors resonate most with you, whether as inspiration for your own work or as books you treasure as a reader?
I read widely across many genres. I think genre is a very meaningful concept in that it represents a contract with the reader and a relationship with literary tradition. But I also think that genre divisions can be used to marginalize readers or invalidate books. I love to read romance, mystery, horror, literary fiction, speculative fiction and memoir, but I also love some books that aren’t in any of those genres. In terms of influence on my writing, it’s a grab bag. But one influence you can definitely see in Take Me Apart is the influence of gothic literature—I love spooky, atmospheric books.

Which character came first—Miranda or Kate? Was one of the women more challenging to write than the other?
Miranda came first and was easier to write. Mostly because her sections, which are told through archival documents like letters and journal entries, are more confessional. Kate is more a restrained character, so it took some time for me to figure out how to let her guard down enough that the reader could connect to her, while still presenting her the way I envisioned. There were always going to be two characters. It was just a question of figuring out how those two characters balanced each other.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Take Me Apart.

You must be quite adept at gleaning stories and truths from research and archives, thanks to your work at a museum and your years of scholarship. Have you assembled your own personal archives? What do you think we can learn from what people choose to save or discard, how they preserve it and the value assigned to various artifacts?
Well, I have assembled the raw material of my own personal archives by never throwing any papers away! But I would not say the papers are organized like an archive. I did think a lot about what it would feel like to have someone come in and organize my papers. I would kind of love it, because then I could find everything, but I would also hate it, because (as we see in the novel!) the person organizing the archive gets to make their own story out of your life. Any archive tells us not only about the psychology of the person who created or saved the documents, but also about the psychology of the person organizing it and how they interpret the documents.

What led you to choose New York City in the 1970s and ’80s as the era for Miranda’s photography and her husband Jake’s painting? What made that time period and those art forms feel right to you for your characters?
I think it was more important for Miranda’s photography than for Jake’s painting. Without giving too much away about the book, I think Miranda is more authentically connected to that moment in art, which is intentional. I was very interested in that time period because it had so many brilliant, successful female artists, many of whom took a very autobiographical approach to their work—Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, among many others. I wanted to explore that question of autobiography in art, as well as the differences in expectations for male and female artists, and that era seemed like the perfect fit.

You explore mental illness in empathetic and unflinching depth in your book—from Miranda’s and Kate’s perspectives as they suffer and attempt to find peace, as well as from the viewpoints of those who care about them and attempt to provide help. What was most valuable for you as you researched and created these characters?
I wanted both characters’ experiences with mental illness to be realistic and complex. With many mental illnesses, the experience is not a unilaterally negative one—even behaviors that seem destructive from the outside can feel comforting or relieving or exciting from the inside, although they can also feel deeply painful. I think the most valuable thing was just talking to lots and lots of people about the book, so that I could feel confident in the complexity and range of the representations.

Our society worships and elevates fame, but through Miranda we see the ways in which the pressure to produce, fulfill expectations and make money can harm mental health, familial relationships and the talent that drew the fame in the first place. Why was it important to you to explore the corrosive aspects of celebrity in this book?
I’m very interested in the question of ownership and entitlement when it comes to artists and celebrities. Why do we take their lives so personally? Why was I sad when Heidi Klum and Seal broke up? I don’t know either of them! They’re probably living their truths! In Take Me Apart, Miranda craves fame and recognition; she wants to leave a mark on the world, and fame gives her that opportunity. She does have a kind of immortality that other people don’t have. But as you say, that immortality does come at a price for her, and the price is higher than it is for the men in her life. I wanted to explore that trade-off.

Dubiously successful surfing lessons, an astoundingly ill-advised cake and potential romance with Theo . . . all are bright spots amid the darkness and despair Kate uncovers as she archives. How did you maintain your own lightness of being, so to speak, as you worked through the more wrenching elements of the story? 
I’m glad those moments were bright spots for you! I didn’t want the book to feel unrelenting. I wanted there to be ups and downs. Some parts were very emotional for me to write, but I’m not sure how to say which ones without giving big spoilers. I guess the question about lightness of being is really a question about self-care. I have gotten better at self-care over the years. Mostly for me, it means letting myself stop and do something new when I hit a wall. Dogs help!

What surprised you most (and least) about what it was like to write and publish your first book? Are there any lessons learned, delights discovered, etc., that you’ll keep in mind as you embark on your upcoming second novel?
Probably the most surprising thing has been how much it becomes a team effort. You labor alone so long writing the first (and second and seventh) drafts, and then suddenly the door opens and other people come in! Surprise! Time to put on pants! It’s exciting. I have been amazed and honored by how hard the people at my publisher have worked on the book. It has been a deeply collaborative effort.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with BookPage readers about what’s coming up next for you?
I have a second novel under contract, which I am working on now! Stay tuned for that. I also continue to pursue my longtime dream of competing on the Netflix show “Nailed It!”, so if any BookPage readers have an inside track, please let me know.

Sara Sligar takes us inside her lovingly crafted debut thriller, Take Me Apart, which interrogates gender dynamics in the art world, the price of fame and the American cult of celebrity.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Riley Sager

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Riley Sager’s childhood home was not an architectural delight. Rather, he says in a call from his current New Jersey home, “I grew up in Pennsylvania in a boring ranch house. I longed to live in a house that was exciting in some way. I would’ve settled for a second floor! That’s probably why I think haunted houses and buildings with history are cool: childhood boredom.”

The bestselling author of three previous thrillers (he is perhaps best known for 2017’s Final Girls) says the classic horror story The Amityville Horror served as inspiration for his new book, Home Before Dark—but he didn’t think the suburban Long Island setting of that iconic tale would provide the right “aura of creepiness” for his haunted Victorian manor. So he set his supernatural story in a remote area of Vermont, in a small town with beautiful woodlands that become decidedly more threatening under the dark of night.

This turns out to be the least of protagonist Maggie Holt’s problems when she sets out to renovate Baneberry Hall. She inherited the home from her father, who wrote about the horrors that he and his family experienced there 25 years ago in a hugely successful memoir. After just 20 days in the gothic fixer-upper, they abandoned their attempts to downplay and then deal with increasingly terrifying ghostly goings-on. They fled in the middle of the night, leaving all their possessions behind.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, yet the thought of them is very, very frightening to me. That’s what I was aiming for with this book: coming from a place of skepticism, yet also being scared at the same time.”

Her father’s book and the fame and notoriety it engendered have embarrassed Maggie her entire life; she was just 5 when the family made their escape, and she doesn’t remember the events her dad describes. In fact, she thinks her parents made the whole thing up, so it seems perfectly safe to stay in the house while she revamps and sells it, in service of releasing herself from it (and the hurt she feels at her parents’ lying to her).

Maggie muses, “I believe science, which has concluded that when we die, we die. Our souls don’t stay behind, lingering like stray cats until someone notices us. . . . We don’t haunt.” So what if she’s long been bedeviled by nightmares about the threatening figures of Mr. Shadow and Miss Pennyface?

Readers will be delighted to discover that they are not only able to immerse themselves in Maggie’s story (which ultimately transforms into something far more dramatic and frightening than she could’ve anticipated), but they also get to read what her father wrote in his book—a deliciously frightening story well told, even if it might not be true.

After all, Sager notes, “I don’t believe in ghosts, yet the thought of them is very, very frightening to me. That’s what I was aiming for with this book: coming from a place of skepticism, yet also being scared at the same time.”

For Sager, crafting the book-within-a-book was one of the most rewarding aspects of writing Home Before Dark. “It was really interesting to do the back-and-forth,” he says. “Maggie and her father were sort of in a dialogue with each other, almost comparing and contrasting their recollections with each other, like a fun-house mirror. . . . It was fascinating to come up with ways to do that, and have her father’s book be the unreliable narrator, in a sense.”

As Maggie’s days in the house tick by, readers will indeed begin to wonder which narrator is telling the truth—or if anyone is. To add to the mystery, the neighbors, many of whom were there 25 years ago, are by turns friendly and angry, inquisitive and brusque. Might they be hiding something, too? Soon Maggie begins to experience disorienting flashes of memory, but she’s unsure if they’re real or just imprinted on her consciousness after years of hearing about Baneberry Hall’s generations of pain and sorrow.

Like her parents before her, Maggie finds that her stress is amplified by her reluctance to leave the house, because of both her skepticism and her desire to sell the place. That’s in keeping with a theme that’s been woven through Sager’s work thus far: the ways in which dire financial straits can constrain people’s choices and well-being. His characters often make decisions they hope will give them a monetary boost with, shall we say, mixed results.

“It does make plotting things easier when there’s desperation involved,” he says. “For example, Maggie’s family felt they couldn’t leave Baneberry Hall because they didn’t have money to buy a new house,” thus making them less likely to immediately run screaming into the night like people with more money could and would have.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Home Before Dark.

“That’s one thing I think genre books are able to do very well: address important issues while still entertaining,” Sager says, adding that the financial insecurities of his characters come from his own experience. “Five years ago, I was laid off from my job [at a newspaper] and had a year of unemployment. During that year, I wrote Final Girls. So something great came out of it, but it was just this year of constant worry. I knew that if I put on the page how I felt at that time, a lot of people would be like, I hear you, I’ve been there.”

Sager explains that it’s important for him “to put my concerns and thoughts into these books, a bit of myself. A lot of times in genre fiction, the characters are just wealthy. It doesn’t say how, they’re all just wealthy. . . . I like to put a little bit of realism in.”

Another element that’s become a Sager signature is his female protagonists. He says that writing women characters “started by happy accident through my first book, Final Girls, because the trope in horror movies is final girls. If it had been final boys, it would’ve been a very different book, and probably a very different career.”

It’s crucial that, in Sager’s books, there isn’t much talk of female characters’ clothing, makeup, physicality, etc. Instead, the focus is on what they’re thinking and experiencing—which is by design. “I think about what makes this person tick, not what makes this woman tick,” he says.

“I’m fully cognizant how darn lucky I am [that] this is my full-time job. I don’t work in a coal mine; my job is to sit here and try and scare people.”

Thus, having half of Home Before Dark “be from a man’s point of view was kind of worrisome to me. In my other three books, there’s a first-person female present-tense narrative,” he says. “To throw this male past-tense narrative in the mix . . . how much should be Maggie’s, and how much should be her father’s? It was definitely a challenge.”

What hasn’t been so difficult, he says, is diving into a whole new set of characters and storylines with each new book. “It’s not easier than writing a series,” he says, which he did under his real name, Todd Ritter, before he adopted the Riley Sager nom de plume, “but it’s better for what I’m trying to do: create a little world in each book. It’s fun to not be tied down to one set of characters, or one style.”

Ultimately, Sager says, “I’m fully cognizant how darn lucky I am [that] this is my full-time job. I don’t work in a coal mine; my job is to sit here and try and scare people.”

Fortunately for Sager fans, there’s no rest for the spooky. Once readers have recovered from the goings-on at Baneberry Hall, they can keep an eye out for his next book, a story that goes in a “completely different direction from Home Before Dark.”

All the horrors of home are revealed in Home Before Dark, a cleverly crafted literary hall of mirrors that questions the truth of memory.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Kathleen Rooney

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

An intrepid pigeon and a patient war hero are at the heart of this sweet and creative novel set during World War I. 

Kathleen Rooney knew that writing half of her new book, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, from the point of view of a pigeon was a risk. But to the self-described animal lover, assuming a bird’s POV made perfect sense.

“A lot of people dislike and malign pigeons, but I never have,” Rooney says from her Chicago home, where she lives with her spouse, author Martin Seay. She rejects the idea of pigeons as rats with wings. “If you watch them, they’re such good fliers. . . . They’re really clean and smart. And rats aren’t that bad, either. They’re doing the best they can!”

Rooney, perhaps best known for her 2017 bestseller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, says her interest in a feathered narrator was sparked by one of her students at DePaul University, where she is an English professor. “A student named Brian referenced Cher Ami in a poem and said to me, ‘Look it up!’ Of course, I did—and it blew my mind that this pigeon was so heroic and is stuffed and on display in the Smithsonian.”

Her researcher instincts activated, Rooney learned that Cher Ami, a British homing pigeon, helped save a group of American troops known as the “Lost Battalion” during a horrific, multi­day World War I battle. The story of this amazing pigeon, the terrible conflict and the extraordinary man who commanded the beleaguered battalion—Major Charles Whittlesey, the other narrator of the novel—is strange, true and, in Rooney’s hands, altogether haunting and compelling.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

“Once I learned about Charles, I was fascinated with him—how good he was at some things, yet how ill-suited he was to be a war hero,” Rooney says. In her reading about the era, she was intrigued by the cultural fixation on masculinity, a complicated issue that we continue to contemplate a hundred years later. “It was the early 20th century, people were moving from rural to urban, and there was a real fear of men getting soft,” Rooney explains. “Going to war was something you had to do if you wanted to be a man.”

In Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, Charles reflects on his happier prewar days in New York City, where he ran a law firm with a college classmate. Many an evening, he visited parts of the city where he could spend time with other closeted gay men and truly feel like himself. When it came time for battle, though, he focused on strategy and survival as he and his men, positioned in trenches in a section of the French Argonne Forest known as “the pocket,” found themselves cut off from supply lines, surrounded by enemy German troops and subjected to so-called friendly fire.

Carrier pigeons were the group’s only hope of contacting headquarters and getting the other Americans to stop dropping shells on them. Cher Ami flew through gunfire to deliver Charles’ message, which finally stopped the onslaught. (Incredibly, the note ended with “For heaven’s sake, stop it.”) She lost an eye and a leg, among other wounds, but was eventually able to hobble around on a tiny wooden prosthesis that the Army made for her. She lived another year before dying of her injuries in 1919, but in the novel she continues speaking to readers from her perch behind glass at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where she’s been since her death.

“In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Of visiting Cher Ami at the museum, Rooney says, “I found it profoundly moving. The conflicts killed 10 million solders, 10 million civilians, and untold animals were lost. The fact that she was so important that they saved her, when normally pigeons with those injuries would have just been discarded, shows what she did and how important it was.”

There’s an interesting lesson to be learned from Charles’ decisions in battle, too. “He was famous for something we’d describe as passive,” Rooney says. “Once they were in the pocket, he waited as hard as he could. I’m an impatient, active person. . . . His act was stillness, waiting, keeping everybody’s spirits up. The way he did that was amazing.”

Cher AmiAlthough Charles was able to save 194 members of his 500-man division, he couldn’t save everyone, and the experience took a heavy toll. He and his compatriots were given medals, held up as heroes and reminded of their wartime experiences daily, in a time when PTSD was only just beginning to be acknowledged.

“The only cure [for PTSD] is prevention,” Rooney says. “War has been around forever, but I think it can end. It breaks people, and the way to not break people is to not make them [go to war] in the first place.”

With Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, she hopes “to make people think about why we still do this. To what extent, as a civilization, are we complicit? In so much of the world, there are those who have an enjoyable life built on violence they don’t see. I hope it makes people think about that.”

Rooney also hopes the book, with its portrayal of the charming and brave Cher Ami, will boost appreciation of our furry and feathered friends. After all, she says, “What aerodynamically is really happening when a bird like that goes into the air? Pigeons are really miraculous animals, and I think if you pick any animal and go really deep into how does it work, no matter your belief system, it makes you aware of something outside yourself.”

 

Author photo by Beth Rooney

An intrepid pigeon and a patient war hero are the heart of this sweet and creative World War I novel from Kathleen Rooney.
NonfictionMemoir

Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

For Vicki Laveau-Harvie, raw emotion has no place in the act of writing a memoir, even one as harrowing as The Erratics. “I believe really sincerely that I won’t write anything that will have an impact for other people if I’m not paying attention to craft, if I’m writing it in the heat of emotion,” the author says in a call to her home in Sydney, Australia. “That would be like reading somebody’s diary. That’s not as interesting as memoir.”

The Erratics is anything but uninteresting. Rather than a way to release emotional pain, its careful and artful creation was an opportunity to explore a constellation of life events that had long resisted Laveau-Harvie’s efforts to commit them to the page. Readers who can relate to her story will find comfort in knowing that there are others who understand what they’ve endured. Those who cannot imagine such goings-on will have their eyes opened to what it might be like to have a father who seemed to lack any protective instincts and a mother who relished telling her children, “I’ll get you and you won’t even know I’m doing it.”

After surviving a traumatic childhood, Laveau-Harvie left her home in Canada to attend university in France, where she remained for 27 years until she and her husband and children moved to Australia in 1988. In 2006, Laveau-Harvie’s elderly mother broke her hip and was hospitalized. “My sister and I decided to go without thinking much about it,” she says. “They were our parents. Our father was in need of our help, so we went.”

“That has been the best part of all this, connecting with people.”

The memoir opens as the author and her sister, both estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, arrive in Canada and soon realize that their mother has been starving and isolating their father. The sisters attempt to find appropriate care for their mother, whom they know requires mental health care, in order to protect their increasingly frail father. Old pain and fear are dragged back into the light, and it’s often not clear whether the women will be able to save their father from their mother, or save themselves from having to return to a place where they endured so much anguish.

Laveau-Harvie didn’t begin writing The Erratics until six years after this initial act of daughterly duty. The memoir’s form is often poetic, sometimes impressionistic, with hits of dark humor. “I wanted the writing to be spare,” she says. “I wanted the movement between direct speech and thought to be fluid. That’s why there are no quotation marks. I wanted that distance to be there in the way I told the story.” This creative choice echoes the distance she put between herself and her lived experiences. “That’s what I had to do to survive,” she says.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Erratics.

In testament to its broad emotional resonance, The Erratics gained critical acclaim upon its initial publication in Australia, which was itself an emotional roller coaster. Laveau-Harvie put the manuscript in a drawer for two years after writing it and only brought it out again after she had applied for a week at a nearby writers’ retreat. An author there urged her to try to publish her story, and she took their advice. “Finch [a small Australian press] had a memoir prize of publication and $5,000,” she says. “It’s a well-known prize, one of the few for memoir here. So I did submit my manuscript [in 2018], and I won. I was flabbergasted! It was a wonderful opportunity.”

Then things took a turn. Finch closed down after Laveau-Harvie’s book had been in print for just six months. “I was casting about for what to do,” she recalls. “Do I self-publish? Sell it on a street corner? I had no idea, and no experience in the publishing world.” She gained some experience in short order, though, when she won the prestigious Stella Prize in 2019 (and its $50,000 purse), secured an agent and was signed by a major publisher. The Erratics was published in the U.K. and Australia in 2019 and is being published in the U.S. and Canada in 2020. “It’s been a fairy tale!” she says.

From start to finish, The Erratics offers moments of wonder and beauty amid struggle and distress.

As for the enthusiastic response from readers, Laveau-Harvie muses, “After the book came out, people would say, ‘You’ve written my story.’ I’d think, no, I haven’t. I’ve written my story. But themes of aging, estrangement, mental health issues in families and their destructiveness, the different ways people cope—those are universal kinds of things.” She adds, “That has been the best part of all this, connecting with people—once I got over the shock of people who didn’t know me buying my book.”

It’s no wonder those early readers expressed such excitement. From start to finish, The Erratics offers moments of wonder and beauty amid struggle and distress. There are lovely and affirming reunions with long-lost family members and many lyrical contemplations of the Canadian landscape that sustained the author first as a child and again when she returned so many years later.

During those intervening years, Laveau-Harvie, who is now 77, endeavored to recover from the family dysfunction that serves as the centerpiece of her moving and memorable debut book. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” she says. “I’ve been getting the monkeys off my back for many years.”

Author photo © Michael Chetham.

For Vicki Laveau-Harvie, raw emotion has no place in the act of writing a memoir, even one as harrowing as The Erratics. “I believe really sincerely that I won’t write anything that will have an impact for other people if I’m not paying attention…

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

Richard Osman

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Coopers Chase Retirement Village is a lovely place to live: the former convent set on 12 verdant acres in Kent, England, is now home to 300 residents over age 65. There’s a swimming pool, exercise studio and restaurant, as well as roaming sheep and llamas. The Jigsaw Room is a hot spot, but not because of its exciting tabletop puzzles; rather, on Thursday nights, a quartet of clever 70-somethings gathers to engage in amateur detective work. Their mission is to solve cold cases, but the group must change focus when multiple new murders happen right in front of them. Soon, they’re wondering: just how well do they know their neighbors?

Debut author Richard Osman is a celebrity in his native England, where he hosts, produces and directs several highly popular TV shows. We spoke with him about his inspirations for The Thursday Murder Club, and what it’s like to dive into an entirely new medium.

Congratulations on your first book! Was it difficult to go from working on TV shows to crafting a novel? Were you able to smoothly transition to a new form of creative expression, or was there a bit of an adjustment period?
Thank you so much! I loved the new discipline of novel writing. Of sitting by myself, chatting to my characters, and throwing all sorts of awful trouble their way. The main thing I missed about television is that in TV there is always someone who can go and get a coffee for you, whereas when you’re writing you have to get your own. I can’t believe novelists have put up with this for so many years.

The members of the Thursday Murder Club are so smart, witty and resourceful: the charismatic Elizabeth, who hints that she was once a spy of some sort; Joyce, the observant former nurse; Pilates-loving former psychiatrist Ibrahim; and Ron, the famous trade union leader. Do you identify with any of the club members?
I think I am very similar to Joyce, who always gets her own way, but with absolute British kindness and courtesy. I also share Ibrahim’s love of lists and statistics. And also his total fear of spontaneity. I wish I was sometimes a bit more like Elizabeth and Ron, who are both able to steamroll their way through life, leaving chaos in their wake, but always with a pure heart and good intentions. I think somewhere between the four of them might be the perfect human being!

"For large periods of writing I felt I was possessed by the spirit of a 76-year-old woman . . . "

Joyce’s diary entries offer readers a peek at the inner workings of the club—her empathetic nature shines through, as does her delight in documenting the occasions when she follows Elizabeth’s often hilarious lead into extra-legal endeavors. What made you decide to structure the book that way, and to choose Joyce as the diarist?
Joyce is the character who thinks most like me. Her mind constantly wanders off in different directions. She was just a dream to write, talking very earnestly about murder, then veering off into some anecdote about her vacuum cleaner. Her insightful, empathetic nature allows her to spot things the others, particularly Elizabeth, might miss. She likes to sit and think, and work things out. I enjoyed listening to her doing that, and writing it all down for her. For large periods of writing I felt I was possessed by the spirit of a 76-year-old woman, and I have to say I recommend it to anyone.

Have you always wanted to write a mystery? What mystery books or authors are dear to your heart? Your brother Mat also published his first book this year—did you commiserate and read each other’s work? (Does this herald a shiny new era of Osman Brothers Literature?)
I have always been a crime fiction junkie. From Patricia Highsmith and Agatha Christie, through to Harlan Coben, Shari Lapena and Jeff Deaver. Writing a mystery gives you such a perfect excuse to think up the perfect murder, just in case you ever need one.

My brother is so much cooler than me, just effortlessly hip, and his writing is so beautiful and dark and clever. I adored his novel, and I was thrilled he loved mine. It is a rare and happy day when your older brother tells you he’s proud of you.

How do you think your work in television has influenced and informed your work? For example, did your quiz-show experience give you confidence as you crafted characters who piece together clues and evidence? And do you think producing and directing aided you in managing big-picture aspects as well as fine details of your narrative? Were there any aspects of your story or characters or the writing process that you were uncertain about?
In television formats you have to grab people’s attention, and you have to keep it. They could switch over at any second. People will read maybe 30 pages of a new book before making their mind up. They’ll probably watch about 30 seconds of a new TV show, before switching over to “Grey’s Anatomy” reruns.

So in a TV quiz, you grab people quickly, you explain the rules quickly, you give viewers a reason to stay to the end (Who’s going to win??? How much???), and then you give them a host and contestants who they want to spend a bit of time with.

And I suppose that’s naturally how I went about writing. Grab them, and then entertain them, and then give the answer they were looking for. I worried that if I started describing the color of the sky for a page and a half, people would simply put the book down and watch “Judge Judy” instead. And I wouldn’t blame them.

Many of your characters must reckon with the consequences of their past choices, whether through daily efforts to manage emotional pain and regret, or a sudden and dramatic need to avoid getting arrested. The need to take personal responsibility also resounds through your characters’ lives. Is that something that intrigues or is important to you, in terms of themes you explore in your work?
I’m a great believer in eventually taking responsibility for who you are, and for the choices you make. We are not defined by our mistakes and failures, we’re defined by how we respond to our mistakes and failures. Some people respond by becoming better human beings, and some respond with anger and self-pity. We all know examples of this. I’m a believer that the qualities of kindness and hard work should be rewarded. In the real world it’s not always the case, but in books we can create the world we want.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Thursday Murder Club.

You mentioned in your acknowledgments that a visit to a retirement community sparked the idea for your book. What aspects of that visit especially caught your fancy? Did you also visit police departments or interview detectives as you created the characters of Chris and Donna, the police officers who work in collaboration—and sometimes competition—with the murder club?
I loved the friendships I witnessed, and the mischievous nature of many of the residents. So much laughter, so much wine and so much wisdom. It was a beguiling mix which I wanted to show to the world.

Some of the residents of the real village are worried that the book will be a hit, and they’ll have to deal with coachloads of tourists disturbing all their beautiful peace. So I promised I would never tell anyone where the real village is.

The truth is, they would love it if tourists came to visit. I guarantee it. They’ll be selling t-shirts and refreshments. You wait. If the book takes off, they’ll have a sign put up within a month. “You are now entering Thursday Murder Club Country.” They’ll be charging for entry.

At various points in your book, the characters muse on the seasons of their lives, and often make swift decisions due to a heightened awareness of time passing. What was it like to inhabit characters who are a few decades older than you are now? Did it feel freeing, or daunting, or something else entirely?
I am turning 50 this year, and that seems absurd to me. Basically, in my head I feel like I’ve got about five years left. However, in the next book Ibrahim goes through a statistical analysis of life-expectancy statistics (he is nothing if not cheery) and according to the official numbers I have at least 35 years left, so I think maybe I’m overreacting.

What’s up next for you—and for the members of the Thursday Murder Club?
I am writing the follow-up now, and everyone who survives the first book is back. And rest assured, there is plenty of trouble ahead for them all.

I have had such a lovely reaction to the book in the U.S. I am desperate to come out to visit readers and bookshops and libraries. Hopefully, that will be possible sooner rather than later.

Coopers Chase Retirement Village is a lovely place to live: the former convent set on 12 verdant acres in Kent, England, is now home to 300 residents over age 65. There’s a swimming pool, exercise studio and restaurant, as well as roaming sheep and llamas. The…

Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Ellery Lloyd

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Paul Vlitos and Collette Lyons explore the anxiety-inducing allure of Instagram in their debut thriller, People Like Her, written under the pen name Ellery Lloyd.

Congratulations on your first Ellery Lloyd novel! How did you decide on your collective pseudonym? Did you also come up with the idea for the book together?
Collette: We should probably have a better answer for this, but after toying around with various combinations of our own names, we decided to just go with something we liked the sound of. Long first names and short second names sound good we think, and we wanted something unisex that wasn’t just initials—so then it was just googling and playing around with it. We only remembered after settling on Ellery Lloyd that Ellery Queen was the pseudonym for a pair of crime fiction writers in the 1930s!

Your novel takes us into the minds of Emmy, a famous “mumfluencer,” her conflicted husband, Dan, and an unnamed person who wants to destroy Emmy. Did you each take a character? Did you do anything to inhabit those points of view?
Paul: We did start off writing separate characters, but actually by the time it came to the second draft, we both wrote and rewrote all of it—and we can’t now tell who did what.

Collette: There are parts Paul is especially proud of that I am pretty sure I wrote, and vice versa! In terms of research and inhabiting the parts, well, we had a young child, and I personally—and not with the novel in mind, just as a new mum whiling away hours stuck on the sofa under a baby who fed constantly and wouldn’t sleep—fell down an Instagram scroll hole. So I felt quite immersed in that world!

"We wanted to show both sides of the coin, the good and the bad, in People Like Her."

People Like Her certainly captures the joy, pain and occasional grossness of parenthood. Did you look back on your lives together for inspiration?
Collette: The grossness, definitely. There were a lot of exploding nappies in the Ellery Lloyd household! Something a friend said before our daughter was even born really lit a spark in my mind for the novel: If you find it all easy, if you’ve had a good birth and your baby is a dream, doesn’t cry, feeds well, sleeps through—don’t tell other parents, because they will either think you’re lying or hate you. We didn’t have that baby (she didn’t sleep pretty much ever), but I thought that was so interesting, and we definitely riffed on that with Emmy and Dan.

Collette, you’re a journalist and editor, and Paul, you’re a novelist and professor. How did your backgrounds inform your writing? Did either of you get veto power over any aspects?
Paul: We’ve both spent our careers giving people feedback or editing others’ work. It would be a bit churlish to complain about someone else editing our own—especially someone you’ve been married to for a decade. Practically, we work in a Google Doc and so can see when one is tinkering with the other’s sections, and honestly it’s never caused an issue, but we do need a watertight chapter plan from the outset, or it ends up like a game of Consequences!

What is your relationship with social media?
Paul: I don’t use it really, apart from Twitter occasionally.

Collette: I used it far, far too much when our daughter was little, and perhaps that was why I wanted to place it at the heart of our first novel, so that at least I could chalk all those hours up as research! I didn’t use it in an especially healthy way if I’m honest—I never interacted, only scrolled, because I was shy, I think—but I was also conscious that some people do find real community and connection there. We wanted to show both sides of the coin, the good and the bad, in People Like Her.

Your approach to Emmy is so clever: an Instagram influencer who draws a million-plus followers by making her life seem worse, not better, than it is. Do you think people will reevaluate those they follow on social media, and why they follow them, after reading your book?
Collette: None of us presents an exact replica of our true selves on social media, and anyone who uses Instagram hopefully knows that. So no, I’d be surprised if it made anyone reevaluate who they follow or why. I hope it might make people question why women especially have to belittle their own achievements to seem relatable, and therefore likable, though.

The business acumen of Emmy and her agent, Irene, is impressive, whether dealing with endorsements or reacting to a crisis. Was it important to show the savvy and strategy behind the selfies—and to explore the conflict between what gets followers vs. what’s morally sound?
Collette: They are both smart, ambitious and intelligent, two young women who have thrown themselves into the influencer industry and are really, really good at it. Yes, sometimes they make bad—terrible, even—decisions, but those decisions are based on what they know works. They’d both probably argue that it’s the audience’s fault they’re driven to those lengths to keep their business going. Whether or not you’d agree with them is another matter, of course.

What sorts of patterns did you see as you researched influencers?
Collette: The biggest pattern I saw is that only the people who take it seriously actually succeed and make money. You don’t become an influencer by accident. What I think will be interesting, and we explored this with Emmy, is how this very new career path pans out in the long term. Because the one constant with this sort of technology is that it will change, and that is something even the biggest influencers can’t influence.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of People Like Her.

How have you been celebrating the release thus far? What’s next for you?
Paul: Well, given the pandemic, we have mainly been celebrating by sitting at home and writing our second book, which is set in the world of celebrity private members’ clubs. We are hugely excited by all the positive reviews of People Like Her, and we can’t wait for it to reach a wider audience. It would, of course, be amazing to see Emmy and Dan on screen. We have offered our services to play them but weirdly haven’t heard anything back. . .

 

Author photo by Annick Wolfers.

Paul Vlitos and Collette Lyons explore the anxiety-inducing allure of Instagram in their debut thriller, People Like Her, written under the pen name Ellery Lloyd.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Katrine Engberg

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Caritas Fountain is Copenhagen’s oldest fountain, a popular gathering spot for residents and tourists alike. Alas, it is also where Bettina Holte is found murdered: floating, nude, drained of blood, a series of cuts serving as strange and grisly cues. In the next two days, two more bodies are found—also in water, also exsanguinated.

Detective Jeppe Korner and his colleagues (plus Detective Anette Werner, on maternity leave but doing casework on the sly) must find the killer before they can strike again. They work through a large number of plausible suspects connected to a psychiatric facility for teens called The Butterfly House, unearthing terrible secrets and raising more questions along the way. We talked with author Katrine Engberg about her inspirations and motivations, and how she changed careers from a dancer and choreographer to a creator of the darkest of murder mysteries.

Your novels are bestsellers in your native Denmark and are now being published in the U.S. (and many other countries). Congratulations! What has it been like to work with the various new editors and publishers and translators of your books?
To be anything but grateful in my situation would be downright ludicrous. I am blessed to be working with some of the world's finest publishing houses and very best editors. It feels like having an extended work family all over the world, which makes writing a lot less lonely. That said, there is always some insecurity involved with being translated. Essentially, you hand over control of your most personal voice to a stranger, who then interprets your words in their own language. It is bizarre but also a huge privilege—and great fun!

"I never get tired of trying to understand humankind."

Readers first met Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner in your first novel, The Tenant. In The Butterfly House, you separate them and dive more deeply into their individual personal lives, from Jeppe’s recent divorce to Anette’s frustrations with maternity leave. Will you talk a bit about why it was important for you to reveal their inner thoughts and struggles in this way?
To me the key to any good reading experience lies in connecting with the characters. One has to get to know them and care for them, even in crime fiction. Well, especially in crime fiction. The more twisted and far out a criminal plot is, the more I have to believe in the characters and trust them. I find that a major part of the suspense in any book lies in the interaction between and growth of the protagonists, even if the main goal of the story is to find a killer on the loose. People—and all the different ways we tackle divorce and maternity leave and life in general—are essentially interesting. I never get tired of trying to understand humankind.

Your home city of Copenhagen, Denmark, plays a major role in The Butterfly House. Bodies are found in its waters; suspects represent various subcultures; characters move about both above and underground. Was incorporating the city into your books an “of course” for you?
It was more than an "of course"; it was the inspiration for the whole series and a motor for every story. Readers often name Copenhagen as one of my protagonists, and they are right in doing so. I love my city. Being medieval, Copenhagen is not only atmospheric and beautiful but also has layers and layers of history that speak to you as you wander its streets. Secret corners, subcultures, weirdness—Copenhagen has everything. And it's all sitting right next to the loveliness of Tivoli Gardens and the Queen's Castle. I've always been a fan of how Ian Rankin’s books revolve around, and salute, Edinburgh. I hope I can do the same for Copenhagen.

Before becoming an author, you worked as a dancer and choreographer. Did changing careers feel strange to you, perhaps like a culture shock of sorts, or was it a natural transition? How does dance inform and affect your writerly work?
The transition was slow and felt very natural to me. I used to tell stories with actors on a stage, and now I tell stories with words on a page, but to me the process is very similar. I have always written; it is my most fundamental form of expression. I just never used to show my texts to anyone. And I still work just as intuitively as before. I don't plan ahead much, and I don't control my characters and their actions too sternly; each scene has to progress organically and each sentence has to form naturally . . . like music.

Many of the characters in this mystery work in health care with, shall we say, mixed results. A character muses, “Sometimes working in health care felt like renovating a fixer-upper with modeling clay.” What about this often-Sisyphean pursuit appealed to you as a subject?
All authors are drawn to conflict, and unsolvable problems have their specific appeal. The health care industry is a forever intriguing mixture of good intentions, business decisions, flawed legislation and patients and health care workers with all of their individual needs. Denmark prides itself in having some of the best health care in the world. Even so, many patients—especially psychiatric patients—suffer from inadequate care and the shortcomings of the system. I wanted to shine a light on this hypocrisy.

Your characters also raise important questions about how society views mental illness and those who experience it. One points out that “sick” and “healthy” are loaded and ambiguous terms: “You could argue that any deviation from societal normal is pathological. You could also argue the opposite.” What do you hope readers will take from The Butterfly House about this subject?
We tend to keep mental illness at arm’s length because it frightens us so. But, in reality, we all carry the potential for mental illness, and most of us will experience some form of it firsthand at some point in our lives. Anxiety, postpartum depression, stress—living is a tough business, and it doesn't take much of a push to tip the scale and plummet to the bottom. We need to revise our perception of "sick" and "healthy" and, to a greater extent, embrace walking the fine line over the abyss that is the human mind.

Bodily mutilation plays a role in your first novel, The Tenant, wherein a woman had a pattern carved into her face. In The Butterfly House, the victims have mysterious groupings of cuts on their bodies. Is the psychology of bodily mutilation (or modification) especially intriguing to you?
I wish I could say no, because having a morbid fascination is not the most sympathetic trait I can think of. But I do. I would argue that all crime aficionados share this quirk (and, really, maybe all of us in general, come to think of it). We go through life knowing that death is certain but without having any idea what that means. This fear of the unknown becomes a fascination. Poking the fear makes us feel more alive, ironic as it may seem. In a way, reading crime fiction is like riding a roller coaster: comfortingly frightening. On top of that, I have an affinity for ancient medical equipment, and in The Butterfly House I have combined the two—turning an old device meant to heal and soothe into a murder weapon.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Butterfly House.

Being honest and straightforward, however scary or painful it may be, plays an important part in your characters’ relationships. Whether between Jeppe and his mother or Anette and her husband, making the effort to express, rather than bury, feelings can offer hope and reassurance. What made you choose to highlight that aspect of close personal connections, both filial and romantic?
How people interact with each other (and the psychology that lies behind every action) is what interests me the most, in life as well as when I write. This is true not just for my protagonists but for ALL my characters, including the antagonists and secondary characters. WHY do we do what we do? WHY are we so complex and unpredictable when our wants or needs are fundamentally the same? WHY do some people become violent? People interest me, and I would never read a book if I were not drawn to the characters and their inner lives, even if the plot was original and well crafted. I hope that readers will connect with my characters and maybe even identify with their thoughts and struggles.

The notion of the butterfly effect is fascinating to think about. Will you share what it means to you and how it inspired you as you created The Butterfly House?
The notion of evil people—that a person can be born bad—has always seemed strange to me. We all have the potential for good and bad deeds; what determines the balance between the two can be the smallest things. A misunderstanding between friends, a missed text message, a bus that didn't leave on time—small, innocent things can, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, lead to disaster. That is the butterfly effect: The flap of a butterfly wing on one side of the earth can cause a flood on the other. There is a certain degree of surrender in accepting the butterfly effect, an acceptance of how very small we are and how little control we have over life and death. I like that surrender to circumstance, to life, even to fate itself.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers about The Butterfly House, and what’s up next for Jeppe and Anette (and you!)?
Just that I hope readers will embrace this second book in the series with the same warmth that they gave The Tenant. I am extremely thankful for the fantastic reception the series has had in the U.S. and Canada.

 

Author photo by Les Kaner.

We talked with author Katrine Engberg about her inspirations and motivations, and how she changed careers from a dancer and choreographer to a creator of the darkest of murder mysteries.

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Harlan Coben

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

A perennial scene-stealer in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series finally stars in a book of his very own.

There’s a line in Harlan Coben’s new novel, Win, that’s sure to evoke a frisson of anticipatory delight in the hearts of thriller readers everywhere: “We always knew this day would come.”

That sentence’s stark simplicity and resigned tone perfectly convey a universal truth at the heart of Coben’s body of work, which consists of 33 novels and counting. The author says it best during a call to his New Jersey home: “The past is never quite buried. You may try to bury it, you may throw a lot of dirt over it . . . but it will claw its way back out.”

And claw it does, whether in Coben’s 18 standalone novels, his YA trilogy or the Myron Bolitar series, in which Win—short for Windsor Horne Lockwood III—has served as a mysterious, witty, violence-prone sidekick to the affable Myron, a sports agent with a sideline in off-the-books criminal investigation, since the 1990s. 

Coben has fans worldwide: He’s got 75 million books in print in 45 languages, numerous Netflix series, a critically acclaimed French film adaptation of his 2001 book, Tell No One, and still more projects in the works (including a sequel to 2020’s The Boy From the Woods). He’s also won the Edgar Award, Shamus Award and Anthony Award. 

Through it all, there was one thing he didn’t want to do: write a book about Win. “People have been asking me about it for a long time, but I’ve been resisting it,” he says. “I usually come up with an idea and then ask myself who will tell the story.” Often the answer was Myron or a range of other characters. And then: “I had an idea involving an art heist and a hermit in a fancy Upper West Side apartment, and I thought, ‘That’s Win’s world. I wonder if he could tell the story.’”

"Sometimes nice guys are boring to hang out with. Win’s never boring."

In the novel, a Vermeer painting, stolen from Win’s family decades earlier, has been found at the homicide scene of a man Win had never met, along with a suitcase monogrammed with Win’s initials. The victim, a wealthy hoarder, seems to be connected to the years-ago kidnapping of Win’s cousin Patricia, which itself is tied to domestic terrorists who are still on the run after committing a deadly crime in the 1970s. And the police and FBI? They’re looking askance at Win, to say the least.

Although it feels right that Win’s day has come, writing his star turn was not without its challenges for Coben. For one thing, “My leads, like Myron Bolitar, David Beck in Tell No One or Grace Lawson in Just One Look, are usually fairly nice people. Win is a bit darker. He’s more of an antihero.” 

It’s true: Win is exceptionally handsome and exceedingly wealthy, with an insouciant attitude toward laws, feelings, authority—almost anything or anyone, really—that isn’t a priority for him. While he’s devoted to his longtime friend Myron and feels affection for his own father, Win is also quite comfortable with vigilantism, consequences be damned. “I confess I’m not good about considering long-term repercussions,” Win wryly confides.

What Win is good at is understanding his own tremendous advantages. “He would be insufferable if he didn’t get that,” says Coben. “And that’s also sort of fun for me, because a lot of people in that world don’t get it.”

To wit, while Win is on the hunt for the Vermeer painting’s thief, he muses, “There is an odd psychology amongst those who inherit great wealth, because deep down inside, they realize that they did nothing to earn it, that it really was just a matter of luck, and yet how can it be that they are not special? . . . It haunts us. It makes us compensate. It poisons.” 

Notes Coben, “I expect some people will not like Win, but they’ll find him compelling. That’s all that matters to me.” When asked if he likes Win, Coben pauses for a second and then laughs. “Who cares? I find him great company. He’s a guy I’d love to sit with at a bar and listen to, which is always what your hero should be. . . . Sometimes nice guys are boring to hang out with. Win’s never boring.”

And neither is Win’s story. As it plumbs the character’s complicated origins, it offers insight into what’s behind his obsession with martial arts training and his transactional approach to sex. There are also urgent visits to Lockwood Manor in Pennsylvania, where his father and Patricia begrudgingly reveal some family secrets and decline to address others. Readers join Win on a circuit of his high-end haunts in New York City, too, where he has an apartment in the Dakota and used to prowl the streets on “night tours” (read: opportunities for violence).

And yes, Win includes Coben’s trademark nerve-wracking action scenes as well. Win is savvy and skilled, but there’s always the possibility that he could be outnumbered or outplanned.  Coben does research the tactical nature of brawls, he explains, but “most of the time it’s just my imagination. I’ll put myself in that position . . . and figure out what is the best move. How would I get out of it? What’s a fight really like?” 

He demurs, though, at the notion that readers might be, say, keeping a mental list of techniques learned from Win and his other fisticuffs-minded characters. “I don’t know how many real self-defense things you’re learning from me. I would be careful,” he says with a laugh. “I just know enough to get myself in trouble.”

“I’ve always wanted to be the guy whose book you took on vacation,” Coben says, “but you don’t want to leave your hotel room because you have to know what’s going to happen next.”

As Win races to unravel a multitude of tangled threads, past and present, Coben reveals layers of deception among family members, wary witnesses, criminals who will do anything to avoid capture and perhaps even Win’s own psyche. His attractiveness and wealth gain him leverage and access but cannot ultimately protect him from harsh truths and exceptionally hard decisions. It’s an intriguing and sometimes mind-bending exercise in “What would I do?” This, Coben says, “is the main joy of Win. You may not agree with his decisions, they may not be ethical or legal, but you get it. You see that side of it, and there’s something very appealing about his side.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Win.

That, too, is an important element of the appeal of Win and Coben’s other work: the moral conundrums, the fights that are vicious but sometimes kinda fun, the shocking twists and surprising dispatches from long ago. “I’ve always wanted to be the guy whose book you took on vacation,” Coben says, “but you don’t want to leave your hotel room because you have to know what’s going to happen next.”

He doesn’t take this goal lightly, noting that it’s become something of a mission, or even a calling, for him. “I’ve been very, very lucky, and I take that very seriously. I work as hard as I’ve ever worked, if not harder, on every project I do, because if you’re going to walk into a bookstore and there’s a zillion books for you to buy and you’re choosing mine, that’s a heck of a responsibility.”

A perennial scene-stealer in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series finally stars in a book of his very own.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Carlie Sorosiak

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Carlie Sorosiak wrote her first middle grade novel, I, Cosmo, from the perspective of a family’s golden retriever. Leonard, the titular narrator of her second novel, is a cat—but he’s not just any cat. He’s actually an alien who crash-landed on Earth, intending to take human form but accidentally ending up as a cat. Now a girl named Olive might be his only hope of returning home to the stars. 

How did the inspiration for this book come to you?
A cat came first. I’d just finished writing a book about a dog, so I thought that a cat book would make for a natural follow-up! At the same time, I really wanted to write about a friendly alien. It occurred to me that I could blend the two characters together. (Aren’t cats sort of alienlike anyway?) The idea made me giggle. When I start to giggle about a story, I know I’m headed in the right direction.

How did you approach inhabiting both Leonard’s alien mind and his feline form?
It was certainly a challenge! I write chronologically, so I began with Leonard’s moment of arrival, when he finds himself transformed into a cat on Earth. I wondered what would shock him about his body. His tail? His claws? What would delight him? Leonard’s perspective bloomed from there. He has these catlike instincts (to destroy the curtains, for example), but for the first half of the novel, he actively fights against them.

My own family has two polydactyl cats, Bella and Duncan. Duncan has big Leonard energy, and I drew a great deal of inspiration from the way he moves and the way he approaches the world so curiously. The cat on the cover of Leonard even looks quite a lot like him!

What was fun about writing from Leonard’s perspective? What was challenging?
Writing this book was a perpetual balancing act. The narration is mostly alien, but every once in a while, the cat slips in (as cats tend to do). During the initial drafts, I found it difficult to maintain a balance between them. 

"At the beginning of the book, when Olive rescues Leonard in a storm, she’s feeling exactly the same way I did at 11: incredibly odd. An outsider on Earth."

However, that never took away a single ounce of fun! It was joyous to write from Leonard’s perspective—partially because it was so intellectually challenging and partially because I loved thinking about human customs that might baffle or delight an alien. For example, poetry! While I was writing, I was also preparing to teach an undergraduate poetry class, so Leonard’s variation on William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say” found its way into the novel. I can’t tell you how much I cracked up just thinking about an alien cat writing poetry.

Leonard is fascinated by seemingly mundane objects such as cheese sandwiches, raincoats and Swiss Army knives. How did you decide which objects would catch his attention?
Honestly, I just really love cheese sandwiches! As for the rest of the objects, many of them represent simple pleasures and general humanness. At one point, I think I also Googled “funny human objects.” During drafting, Google is my best friend.

Tell us a little bit about Olive. How did her relationship with Leonard develop as you wrote?
At the beginning of the book, when Olive rescues Leonard in a storm, she’s feeling exactly the same way I did at 11: incredibly odd. An outsider on Earth. And she’s absolutely obsessed with all kinds of animals, including cats. Throughout the novel, Leonard and Olive start to bond in deeper and deeper ways. They’re both outsiders—in Leonard’s case, quite literally! They’re both curious and compassionate and a little bit scared of what life might bring. But now they have each other.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Leonard (My Life as a Cat).

What do the concepts of home and family mean for Leonard and Olive? Did your own understanding of home and family evolve as you worked on the book?
One of my favorite lines in the book is, “You don’t have to be born into a family to call it your own.” I believe that wholeheartedly, and over the course of the novel, Olive and Leonard come to believe that, too. They develop this found family, together on Earth. 

I’ve always been interested in what constitutes a home, as I’ve moved a lot over the years and I often have trouble feeling grounded. But compassionate people ground me. Animals ground me. Friends can be your home.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that my understanding of home and family changed as I worked on Leonard, but the book did cement many of the things I feel. Hold your loved ones close. You can be weird around them, and they’ll still adore you. In fact, they’ll adore you because of your you-ness.

What do you think—and what do you hope—could be out there among the stars?
As a storyteller, I’m particularly fascinated by the Voyager golden record and the sounds of Earth that NASA chose to capture and send into space to represent humanity. Aliens are definitely out there. It’s a statistical probability. Whether they’re fluffy, catlike and dream about cheese sandwiches . . . well, that’s perhaps another story!

Author photo courtesy of Carlie Sorosiak.

Carlie Sorosiak wrote her first middle grade novel, I, Cosmo, from the perspective of a family’s golden retriever. Leonard, the titular narrator of her second novel, is a cat—but he’s not just any cat. He’s actually an alien who crash-landed on Earth, intending to take human form but accidentally ending up as a cat. Now a girl named Olive might be his only hope of returning home to the stars. 

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